Reconciled powers

Unlike many who write about Paul’s teaching on the “powers,” GB Caird pays attention to Colossians 1:20, where Paul claims that things in heaven – which much include powers and principalities (1:16) are reconciled and pacified by the cross. When they do notice this verse, writers like Walter Wink push it out to the eschaton.

Caird notes that Paul is far from sharing this pessimism about the future of the powers: “Paul seems to me to say that the Christian’s loyalty to society and the state, which are derivative authorities, must always be subordinated to his loyalty to the absolute authority of God in Christ; and that by the continued influence of Christ, working through his loyal followers in the church, the state itself may be brought progressively more and more within the Christian dispensation, and the affairs of state directed not merely by the ethics of law but by the ethics of the Gospel.”